Chapter 217: Madeline
My heart is sprinting. Reid Anderson loves me. He loves me. Me—clumsy, nerdy, awkward me. Not a heels-and-miniskirt me. This me. I can’t believe it and somehow it makes perfect sense, because the love in my chest for him feels like it’s been growing there since the first day.
Is it too cliché to say the world goes glittery? That I’m seeing hearts and unicorns and little fireworks? Because that’s what it feels like when he says it.
“I’m going to need you to tell me that all day,” I whisper.
He chuckles, kisses me slow, and murmurs, “Deal.” Then, steady and sure: “It’s true. I love you, Madeline.”
I shiver. I will never—ever—get tired of his deep, rough voice saying those words. He sets me down, scoops up the takeout, and we head inside.
Jake’s on the phone when we walk in. “Okay—thank you. I appreciate it. Thank you.” He hangs up.
I hold the bags up. “Ta-daaaa,” I sing, then start rambling about everything we got and how the ragu smells like it simmered for three days, but the twins are… doing a twin thing. They’re looking at each other like they’re talking without moving their mouths.
“This really needs to be studied,” I mutter, pointing between them. “When you die, donate your brains to science. Actually, donate your bodies too because how do you look like that.”
Jake blinks, like I snapped him out of a trance, then laughs and drops a kiss on the top of my head before taking one of the bags. He closes his laptop with a soft click, opens containers, inhales. “Smells so good.”
Reid tells him about the Italian, how I sort of speak it; Jake looks as delighted as Reid did. I shrug, sink to the floor, spear a meatball, and pop it into my mouth. “Oh my God,” I garble around it. “Sooo good.”
For a while it’s quiet—paper rustle, plastic fork against takeout tin, that happy silence you earn. Around a bite I ask, “Will you show me the other towns sometime? The ones you explored around here, similar to this one.”
They nod in stereo. “There are a few,” Jake says. “Some in the woods.”
“Some in the mountains,” Reid adds. “Depends what you want to see.”
“All of them,” I decide.
“Sure thing,” they say, like it’s already a promise on the calendar.
When we’re done, they trade off the shower—Jake first, then Reid—steam and mint and the soft thud of their feet. I gather the trash and run it down. A little raccoon is posted like a tiny bandit by the bins, paws folded over its belly.
“Hey, little thief,” I coo. “You’re so cute.”
Laughter floats down from the landing. I look up; they’re both leaning on the rail in joggers and T-shirts. “You have to stop talking to wildlife,” Jake calls.
“Never,” I call back. I toss the bags. “Bye, little thief,” I tell the raccoon, and take the stairs two at a time.
Inside, the room is warm and soft again. I brush my teeth, climb into bed, and ask, “Whose night is it?”
They do the look—some silent exchange I’ll never crack—until they both glance away and Jake crooks a finger. “Come here.”
I go, obviously, tuck myself into him, chest to his side, one leg thrown over his. “I’m so full I can’t sleep,” I confess, already drowsy.
“Movie,” he decides, flipping to something dumb and ridiculous. I barely watch. His fingers are in my hair, slow and soothing, and his palm rubs circles between my shoulder blades like he’s trying to convince my pulse to quiet down. It works. He kisses the top of my head; the world narrows to the sound of the AC and the slide of his hand and the weight of being safe.
I smile into his shirt and drift, mind empty of everything but them—my brilliant, impossible men. Just before sleep takes me, I swear I feel Jake go a little tense beneath my cheek, like a thought tightened in his chest, but then he exhales, and I’m gone.
I’m warm and weightless, tucked into that honey-thick kind of sleep where thoughts don’t have edges, when voices rise at the fringe of it—low and rough, like thunder a few towns over. Words slide against each other, too soft to make sense, then sharper. I flinch toward waking.
“Shut the fuck up for a second—you’ll wake her.”
The sentence snaps clean through the dark, hushed but edged, and the world tilts closer. I float there, not quite surfacing, trying to decide if it’s a dream or the room, if the twins are actually… arguing. The idea feels wrong, like putting a shoe on the wrong foot.
A hand finds my hair.
“Shhhh,” comes next, right at my ear, and the sound smooths the wrinkle I didn’t know I was holding. Fingers comb slow at my scalp, scratch lightly, then press a warm line down the back of my neck. Another hush answers from farther away—quieter, contrite—and the scrape of breath that follows is almost a laugh, almost not.
The smell tells me more than the words—mint and cotton, a little heat, the clean edges of his soap. Jake. I burrow closer on instinct, cheek to his shirt, hand fisting in the soft hem like I could anchor myself there. His palm curves around the back of my head, thumb stroking once at my temple, and the air goes still again. Whatever storm was building, a door closes on it.
Silence settles—heavy, safe, like a blanket fresh from the sun. His heartbeat steadies under my ear. The mattress cradles me. The question—were they fighting?—slips out of my hands and lands somewhere I don’t need to reach.
I breathe him in, let the warmth climb back over me inch by inch, and fall under again, thoughts dissolving into the same velvet dark I left, the last thing I feel his hand in my hair and the surety that I am kept.